Jimmy Carter’s Human Rights Legacy

Jimmy Carter, who is in hospice care, has many virtues. He was an honorable man who held the country together during the post-Watergate period when many Americans had lost confidence in their national institutions. He was fiscally conservative, a prudent environmentalist, and a populist in his own right. But the notion that human rights were the defining aspect of his foreign policy is simply wrong. Carter was sincere about his ideals, but the mandates of the Cold War caused him to shelve human rights concerns for the sake of power politics.